Association Blogging in 2016

Summer just sucks in terms of blogging…or doing much of anything, if you’re me. I don’t mean my summer has sucked; it hasn’t. But between conferences, work, getting ready to have two kids in college, being stressed out by too many entertainment options and just life, making time to write for fun or just do anything creative…forget it. Or at least in my world.

But I was inspired by a recent #Assnchat (don’t know what that is? Here.) featuring association bloggers and podcasters and it reminded me why I love blogging and why I need to keep doing it. I’ve been blogging for more than a decade across many blogs and many platforms. If you care to stalk me back to 2006, you can: Motherwhatnow Redux is still alive and well in all its Blogspot-y circa 2006 glory; the original Mizz Information isn’t much prettier. Ah, the days when you could just write a post and not worry about coming up with an image to go with it, or tagging, or sharing, or…all of what now goes into blogging that extends way beyond just writing and clicking “publish.” Nobody really read my posts except my mom and my sister (still pretty much true) so I could write posts titled “Are You F*cking Kidding Me?” and “Yes, I Know This Blog Looks Like Sh*t” and other classics. Ah, those were the days. 🙂

Fast-forward to 2016 and maintaining a blog just because you like to write is another matter entirely. Look at the current Mizz Information site. For someone with no design skills, I have to say I’m pretty proud of how it looks. It also is the equivalent of having a part-time job keeping it up, between WordPress updates that break it, having to not only find time to write posts but to then craft images to go with each post, because the days of slacking in that department are over now that the theme I use requires a featured graphic for every post. Then the back-end stuff like managing the email subscriptions–gone, too, are the days when I was fine with Feedburner’s generic new post emails–oh hell no! Enter MailPoet and learning about whitelisting and SPF and DKIM, and more graphics. Then the sharing–the relentless, necessary sharing…honestly, just writing about all this stuff is tiring. Try doing it on top of a full-time job for no particular purpose–not leads, not clients, none of that; just because I love writing.

That’s the thing, I guess, about blogging in 2016–it’s not for the faint of heart. “Content creation” is a multi-faceted thing these days, and writing sometimes feels like too much of a slog amidst the cacophony of a billion blogs and “content” sites, podcasts, vlogs, etc. YouTube and Instagram fame are where it’s at–who even knew those were things? The humble little slew of words on a personal blog? Why bother? Because reasons, obviously. Because doing something that’s not about the likes or the views or the buzz does still matter today, as much as it ever did…more even, I think. Even if it feels like your words are just a “Yop!” in the great big content-sphere, they matter…or at least that’s what I’ve come around to, at this stage in the game. Blogging in 2016 is about what it feeds inside of me, not about the reaction (or lack thereof) my words might elicit. That’s why I’m still here, and, presumably, if you’re reading this, you are too…because words still matter to you, even if they’re the rambly words of someone you may have never met. And in the association world, I think they matter even more–especially the words of just regular people like you and me, working in a sector that can make you feel like tearing your hair out or just crying for lack of resources, lack of reason, lack of respect from the for-profit world.